While your kids use their mobile devices, what do you do? Have a cup of coffee while browsing Facebook or Instagram maybe?

In our household the kids – aged 7 and 3 – normally get to play with a tablet 15 minutes at a time. When the gaming session starts, my husband and I seize the opportunity to check out our own mobile phones to read the Facebook messages or see if something interesting is going on Twitter. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Well, it depends. If you know for sure what games the kids play and that the games are suitable for them, you’re fine. In case you don’t have a clue what happens on the children’s devices, there’s a big chance you’re screwed.

Carry your responsibility

Parents bear the heaviest responsibility in children’s safety. We parents need to teach our offspring how to behave to stay safe. And even when we believe the kids have learned, we still have to supervise them.

We keep on forgetting that all these parenting guidelines apply to the internet and games too. When it comes to those, we get lazy. Instead of getting to know the app our child is fascinated about, we rather like our friends’ newest Instagram pictures.

Oftentimes it doesn’t take more than five minutes to find out what a game or an app is all about. Use our checklist as a base. One simple trick is asking the kids what they are doing and being interested in it.
Using those minutes will pay off. You do your share in raising a smart digital kid and will probably keep plenty of bad things from occurring.

So what do you do the next time your kids are on their mobiles?

About the author:

Pia Edman, Momio

Pia Edman worked as a Finnish Community Manager from 2009 to 2015. She has several years of experience in working with online communities and online safety as well as with digital content creation and digital advertising. Pia has a master’s degree in Finnish language.

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Let’s say you are going to take the bus. It’s a short trip, so paying the bus fare seems like a lot of money, but you are too tired to walk. When waiting in line to get in, you notice that the driver is not paying attention at all. You decide to sneak in without paying. If you don’t get caught, you continue the day like nothing happened. You know what you did was wrong, but are mostly just happy about the money you saved.

Picture: Podniap, a goSupermodel user

But what if the driver does notice, and as you are walking past him, points out that you didn’t pay? You will probably fire up all kinds of excuses: “I forgot!”, “I didn’t know you had to!” or “I do had a ticket but I dropped it somewhere!” You do all this even though you know you were doing something wrong to begin with.

Getting caught sucks. When we get caught, we try to justify the “crime” to ourselves by any means possible (“The bus company makes enough money anyway” or “But that one time I bought a ticket and didn’t use it”), all the while knowing that what we did was wrong.

“I didn’t break the rules!”

From time to time, we see examples of this on our social media services. When we spot someone breaking the rules, we either give them a warning or a timeout, depending on which rule was broken and in what way, and the history of the rule-breaker.

Sometimes we see kids complain about their punishments. Some can be very loud in their complaints. Instead of learning from the warning, the person decides to make a big (and sometimes public) deal out of it. Swear words fly around when the person acclaims that we’re unfair and that all rules are stupid.

Of course we may have made a mistake and given a punishment without good reason. It’s not common, but it can happen. Then the right thing to do would be to contact us and get the thing sorted out.

Often we can conclude that the loud complaining is actually the person’s conscience talking – but it is difficult to admit that something you did was wrong. It can be easier to start believing that “the whole world” is against you, and that you most certainly are a victim!

There are two sides to every story, but one of the sides can be hiding underneath guilt. Because, you know, “the bus driver did it on purpose just to annoy me” – it had nothing to do with you trying to sneak in for free.

About the author:

Silja Nielsen, Momio

Silja Nielsen is Head of Community and Safety at Momio. She has worked at the company since 2010. Silja has a master’s degree in Media Studies and is interested in privacy, online behaviour and online communities.